


Papa

by jugheadjones



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Americana, Brothers, Child Abuse, Family Dynamics, Father-Son Relationship, Parent Death, Parent-Child Relationship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-21
Updated: 2019-06-16
Packaged: 2019-08-26 22:02:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 9,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16689724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jugheadjones/pseuds/jugheadjones
Summary: "all we know about manhood is what we have seen and what we have learned from our fathers"- bruce springsteen





	1. go to bed now; it's getting late

For years when he thought of Artie, the memory would be that of Fred’s white, tear-struck face in the room where the man had died, his arms around his father’s corpse as he knelt beside the bed, roughly sobbing the word _Papa_ over and over as though it would rouse him. The image of it is so potent that FP can see it still as an adult, though time has softened the edges of the trauma and he has begun to think equally of Artie as he knew him alive – proud and hard, with heavy, lined hands - eyes that were warm sometimes and cold often but always smouldering like the tip of a cigar.

Yet he can still hear the words Fred had howled in that room, heart-wrenching and raw, remembers even now that he’d begged ‘wake up, wake up, please –‘, over and over, white sheets bunched under his fists so that he’d torn two of his nails when they’d pried him away. How his body shook, his spine hunched under his loose t-shirt from the way he was bending and the way his voice was unlike anything human, how Bunny had gone to him and clutched him to her middle and they had stood like that, mother and son, with her head bent and her gold hair hanging in tendrils around her face. It was the first time her face had showed any sign of age to him, and he was aware of the closing of something – the reducing of this family, that these were the only two Andrews left alive, because of course by then Oscar was gone.

There are other memories from those days that linger - the funeral, well attended despite the rain; the day they had moved the body, sheeted in white, from the house - though of course, they all pale in comparison to Fred begging his father’s cold corpse to rise from the bed where he had died. And if FP’s spent his whole teenage years wanting - his best friend’s girl and then his best friend himself, a life on the right side of the tracks and the admiration of his peers - he has never wanted anything like he had wanted to forget Fred’s voice in that room, the worst kind of grief in the way he was screaming, over and over, _papa papa papa no_ , his voice warped and broken as he gave life to those two syllables that suddenly meant so little, and that finally, he would never use again.


	2. "What are you going to make of yourself?"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> My father said _"Son, we're lucky in this town,_  
>  _It's a beautiful place to be born."_

Alice Cooper was not the first to call the Andrews strong stock - Fred’s ancestors have been farmers and labourers for as far back as his family tree is legible, his father raised modestly in the kind of lifestyle that meant you rose early and worked hard. Artie was the only of his brothers to have gone to college: he had studied business and moved westward into town, away from the open fields of his parents’ farm and near enough to commute to the university. Though the distance from his father’s birthplace to his own was not far, Fred felt, as Artie must have, that they were two separate worlds, separated by more than roads and rivers but by some invisible marker that distinguished the town from the rural places surrounding it.

For one thing, there was the darkness of the farm: a darkness more complete than even the open places he and FP went to stargaze, a darkness so thick and full with the heady croaking of frogs and chirruping of insects that it wrapped around you at night like a heavy coat. There was a strange violence to the dirt roads and haylofts of the place his cousins had been raised - it was subdued in town, hidden by the facades of a clean and suburban main street, but here it was unfettered and wild and ran openly across muddy fields and gravel ditches, something live and unspeakable and full of danger.

Fred’s cousins on his father’s side were slightly older and bigger than him: square-jawed, sure-footed copies of his Uncle Joseph and Uncle Aaron, who themselves looked so alike that Fred’s mother admitted once she’d always thought they were twins. They were rougher and coarser than he was used to, but Fred had always been good at mimicking the postures of boyhood and took easily to their games: fishing and fighting and tromping through underbrush, swimming naked in the stream that cut through their property and hurling heavy rocks at each other with cries of “war!” His cousins integrated him seamlessly into their fun and he always came home with new cuss words, which never seemed to insult his father so much as the rural twang he picked up when he was with them - the way he’d slip y’all or y’aint or yanno into his post-visit vocabulary, making his father stiffen in his place at the dining room table and on frequent occasions threaten to wash his or Oscar’s mouth out with soap.

“Don’t talk like that,” Artie would say angrily, “You weren’t raised in a barn,” and though Fred’s seen the house where Uncle Joseph and Uncle Aaron and his papa grew up - it had seemed handsome to him as a child, though he’d realize later it was no different than any of the other family farmhouses that dotted the surrounding area - it must have seemed to Artie that _he_ had been, and that it was all he could do to spare his children from the same sort of life.

The one and only time Fred can recall his father being truly furious with his brother had been when Oscar had come home from one of these visits talking like their cousins, repeating some redneck slang phrase that Uncle Aaron had loved, long after Artie had warned him to stop. Oscar had been at least twelve or thirteen, but that hadn’t kept their father from scooping him up in the middle of breakfast and carrying him up the stairs to the bathroom, announcing to the house in his booming voice that he intended to purge the speech pattern from his brother’s tongue with the bar of Ivory they kept on the side of the bath.

Fred had no idea if Oscar _had_ had his mouth washed with soap, but Oscar came down crying despite how old he was, more out of surprise that he’d been disciplined than anything. Oscar was usually the favourite. But there were no exceptions in Artie’s rigid separation of their family from the world in which he’d been raised, a world that he had worked hard all of his life to escape, and returned to for visits only at his wife’s gentle insistence. 

/

Fred’s parents were high school sweethearts, married the year Artie graduated from his University program and left his family home permanently. Artie worked as an accountant, using his salary to buy and furnish a house on the North side of town, miles from the wheatfields and barren roads where he had been born, trading in the smell of dirt and cowpies for a permanent, faint aroma of maple off the water. 

Because he had worked so hard to provide his children with a different kind of life than the one he had left, Artie Andrews had no tolerance for laziness. Their platitudes that schoolwork was too hard, that weekends were too short, that Artie made too little time for them during the workweek were met with the same response - that hard work in this life was a necessity, the only way to a better future.

Both of his sons fell short of the mark for different reasons: Oscar had all of Artie’s common sense and none of Fred’s drive, a good head on his shoulders, but no real ambition. Fred was a dreamer who couldn’t complete simple tasks, eternally lost in pursuit of some ultimately forgettable goal - to perform a perfect swan dive off the diving board at the community pool, or successfully peel three bananas in under a minute.

“Why?” his mother had asked him that summer: her sun-freckled youngest sitting at the kitchen table with his father’s watch, surrounded by the discarded remnants of unsuccessful peeling attempts. Where they were not too badly damaged, she was plucking them into a mixing bowl to make banana bread. 

“I just want to,” Fred had replied.

While their goals may never align, the fervent determination with which Fred doggedly tore his nails to strips over his endeavour should have been an indication that Artie’s tireless work ethic was at least dormant in him. Perhaps if Artie had seen this display he would have understood something that had failed to clarify itself for him in all the years he and Fred had known each other: that there was more of him in his youngest than he realized, perhaps more even than in Oscar, who seemed often a perfect reflection of himself.

At the time, however, he only told his son to stop giving his mother so much grief and clean up the goddamn table.

/

It was during Fred’s high school years, when Artie was not yet ill, that he and his father drifted furthest from one another. The ease with which Artie could relate to the now-adult Oscar grated an already unbearable wound between them: Artie as conservative and serious in his forties as his youngest was hot-headed and fanciful. Forever at odds, they turned the suburban house into a battleground: permanently on opposite sides of some quarrel that was usually redundant by sundown but which seemed at the moment to be as important as any battle in history. 

Fred’s very long hair (down to his shoulders by ninth grade), his lack of a job, his dismissive attitude toward his homework, his oddly feminine interest in clothing and cologne and paradoxical disregard for hygiene (his fingernails, perpetually rimmed with earth, must have reminded Artie somehow of his own youth) were all under attack. Fred had also developed a habit his father despised - hanging out at the Chok’lit shop until the early hours of the morning and returning home only hours before the sun. 

Pop’s remained his cover story for these nocturnal outings even when it was evident he had been elsewhere: he would come home smelling of sex or cigarettes, beer or open air, the knees of his pants sometimes torn through and muddied, and still recount with simplistic precision the milkshakes he’d consumed, playing dumb or imprecise about anything else. Band practice took on similar form as an excuse, though in those cases it was rarely a lie - long after local bylaws prevented them from playing, the Fredheads (occasionally only Fred and FP) would still huddle over lyrics, calling an end to their optimistically-named rehearsal when the sun began to rise. They never seemed to have a gig, but they were always rehearsing (though regularly these rehearsals took the form of giddily rushing through suburban streets, drunkenly uprooting election signs wherever they went.) 

Perhaps it was not so much Fred’s absences that Artie resented - at least in Oscar’s youth, Artie had been fond of the adage that _boys would be boys_ \- but Fred’s refusal to break the rules in a way that he understood. Artie loathed the guitar Fred had picked out for his thirteenth Christmas, distrusted his son’s love of rock and roll and questioning authority, and was especially unhappy with Fred choosing to romp around with the son of the town drunk. Should Artie verbalize his displeasure at any of Fred’s habits, Fred would retaliate by intensifying his attempts to master them. The force with which they screamed at one another when their differences came to a head was that of sworn blood enemies, or spouses on the verge of a violent and filthy divorce.

His father begrudged Fred’s late nights with a fury that he had never displayed when Oscar had neglected curfew, suspecting his youngest of every misdemeanour one could incur in a small town, resenting what he considered Fred’s cavalier disregard for his mother’s feelings and his father’s rules. Had they been a more religious family he might have felt it within his right to quote Ephesians 6:2, but while Artie believed firmly in Darwin’s theory of evolution, he still managed to conjure up some sense of divine righteousness about him on these occasions. This left Fred with no choice but to play Cain to his father’s old testament Adam as he slipped stealthily home at three in the morning.

/

It’s strange, then, that one of Fred’s happiest memories of his father has the farm for a backdrop, especially when his family visited the countryside so seldom. Artie felt no real kinship for his brothers, who worked on their own farms with their wives and children now, and Fred saw his father’s relatives only rarely as a child, and then never as an adult. The Andrews boys grew up better acquainted with the cousins on their mother’s side - a much more respectable bunch of blonde-haired Presbyterians who taught Fred to steer a bike with his knees and tie cherry stems into a knot in his mouth. (“Means you’ll be good at french kissing someday,” his older cousin Maisie had told him admiringly - a notion that Fred had vocally resisted at the time, eventually realizing, however, that cousin Maisie had got one thing right.)

Yet when he thinks of his father in the years after his death, panning the messy sludge of his brittle memories and fractured emotions for something gold that will not cause him pain, the farm will swim headily into his memory - the thick cloak of the night, and the sparkling of stars above the two of them like some giant’s paintbrush dipped in wax.

He had been barely six or seven, young enough that the rift between himself and Artie had yet to appear and they breathed in sync: a part and apart of each other, two living things in the country night that was so different from their suburban neighbourhood. He remembers the thrill of being up past his bedtime, of being up with his father, especially, whose time was already precious to him and whom he loved more than anyone. Fred had worn a ballcap jammed tight over his hair, not yet long, while Artie had been dressed in his work clothes - he always wore shirts and leather shoes to visit his family, no matter the danger of soiling them.

To a stranger they might have looked perfectly alike, father and son - people always thought Fred looked like his mother until they saw Artie - but the differences between them hung there too: not-yet-formed, invisible to the naked eye like so many of the constellations had been back home, wiped out by light. Laying side-by-side in the bed of his uncle’s truck they had contemplated the stars, the animal smell of the fields overpowered at last by the cold sweetness of night.

They did not speak: all of Fred’s good memories with his father have this in common and most of the bad ones. Artie may have been an educated man, but he was never one for words. Instead, he remembers how tenderly and wonderfully a feeling of safety had gripped him, even as he lay under the frightening black of space in a dark field that hummed with danger. Artie’s rough hand had wrapped around his own: always too large for the adding machines he worked with, the last trace of the farmhand in him. His grip was warm and calloused, lined already with age, and Fred had gripped back with his child’s palm, never imagining that only ten years from now his father would be gone from him.

There were times in his adult life when he longed to go back to that night, and guarded the memory carefully: that rare night under the stars that they had laid silently beside each other, when it had seemed that everything his father would never be able to articulate in their relationship was so close that he could reach out and touch it.

/

Sometimes on nights he would return home late, a lighted window would signal to Fred that his mother was still awake. This gave him a free pass to slip into his own bed with minimal interaction with his father, though he always felt an absent sort of guilt at the thought that she had waited up so long for him. If the lit window was his father’s study, there was likely no escaping a brush with Artie’s cool disappointment, an unhappiness further inflamed by the fact that Artie was working while his teenage son (perpetually jobless) ran wild and irresponsible around their hometown. 

As Fred’s adolescence wore on, returning to a very dark house became the norm. His heart would begin to pound as he paused at the edge of the cool lawn, their newly-paved driveway a dark mirror that seemed to absorb all light and sound. Unlatching the white picket gate, Fred would creep stealthily around the back of his house and attempt entry through the kitchen door, hoping to slip unnoticed through the screen.

There were certainly nights that he managed to get all the way up the stairs and into his attic bedroom without waking a soul, though Bunny would later recall she had often been roused by the subtle creak of Fred’s floorboard overhead, only then drifting restfully into sleep knowing her youngest had returned safely. The next morning, Artie would ask with a frown what time he had got in, but Fred would be spared the intense, focused displeasure that Artie gave him on those days he slunk in the back door and found his father waiting. 

Fred would know immediately if he was caught: Artie smoked cigars while waiting for his prodigal son to sneak in, and the smell lingered in the air of the house. The room would be pitch black - Fred would of course have avoided the kitchen if Artie had given himself away, perhaps turning in desperation to the elm tree outside his window - and the only light would be the smouldering ember at the tip of his cigar. 

Artie would say nothing at first,  and there were nights when Fred could simply walk by him in his sock feet, slip upstairs and feel the heavy weight of disappointment hit his back, silent displeasure from the solid shadow of the patriarch who sat at the head of the kitchen table, littering the floor with ash. More often, however, Fred’s foot would hit the landing at the bottom of the stairs just as Artie called out to him, his voice loud in the silent house: 

“Son.”

One word, and yet it yanked him back like a lure, made him walk back into the dark of the kitchen, standing at attention the way his father always asked of him, though by three am this effort was perhaps too little too late. Fred and Artie were always _son_ and _papa_ to one another, and whether this was a necessary negotiation of their power struggle or borne from a genuine affection was never clear. Their kitchen clock ticked with the motion of a carved wooden pendulum, and at this time of night, its face bathed in tired moonlight, the noise would be deafening. Artie would draw long on his cigar before speaking again: always the same phrase, so that Fred could revisit these encounters seamlessly in his memory for the rest of his life. 

“Sit down.”

Fred would sit. Perched on the uncomfortable seat of a kitchen chair, not daring to slouch, he would be scrutinized head to toe by his father, the cigar’s ember winking at him like an eye. Once or twice he would feel compelled to tilt his head up proudly to meet the gaze, a soldierly gesture that must have seemed equal parts obedient and defiant. It was only then that Artie would deliver with the tired exasperation of a high school guidance counselor the question he held above his son’s head, disappointment lapping at the edges of his tone as though he knew already that it would never be answered.

“What are you going to make of yourself, Fred?”

These nights in the dark of the kitchen, cigar smouldering between them, would not be the only time that this question was asked of him. They were, however, the only occasions that Fred felt the full force of it: the paralyzing weight of Artie’s request and the insufficiency of his own answer. 

Rarely would he attempt to reply, and when he did it would lose its authority to the building of frustrated tears, knowing already that explanation was futile. Usually he would sit powerless under Artie’s authoritative gaze, folding already - often literally, his head bowing as he stared at the linoleum floor - understanding himself to be inadequate in some momentous way in his father’s eyes. The want to explain himself choked him, and yet there were no words for his dreams that his father could understand - the shadowy ghosts between car tires and his late night hometown streets, the sun-like intensity of stage lights and the weight of an instrument under his fingers in the glare. He could not yet explain them even to himself.

After several minutes of silence, his father would let him go. Both of them were frustrated and resentful, enough so that Fred, climbing the stairs, would imagine with some longing a life he might have lived as one of his Uncle Joseph’s sons: wholly unburdened of expectation. In turn Artie was dismayed by Fred’s lack of discipline - the possibility that, for all his effort to the contrary, his youngest son was as wild and directionless as the wheatfields and haylofts he had left behind in the remnants of his old life.


	3. Someone loves you, drive with care

Artie Andrews owned a massive Buick automobile the colour of buffed leather, which rattled faithfully up the hill to the church every Sunday morning and down again after lunch, when the Andrews family took their Sunday drives. Oscar had learned to drive on the Buick - “learn to park that, you can park anything,” Artie was fond of saying - and Fred has some squashed, sweaty, summer memories of sitting in the hot front seat while a teenage Oscar drove the two of them into town. The Buick had no air conditioning, and in the hotter months the brilliant sun turned the tan interior into an oven. Laying your arm against the metal rim of the door meant searing a cooked line into your skin that would last for weeks. In response to the heat, Fred developed an early childhood habit of hanging his head out the window like a dog.

“Drive safely,” their mother would always call worriedly, because Oscar never seemed to _quite_ have his learners permit yet - Artie Andrews was ten years old the first time his father tossed him a pair of keys and saw no reason that his boys should wait until the appointed age sixteen to start driving. From the time Fred was old enough to sit up by himself, Artie would prop his youngest in his lap in the front seat and allow him to turn the wheel as he worked the gas. Bernice had deep fears that there’d be consequences to this leniency, but for years they never seemed to arise: when Oscar’s sixteenth birthday rolled around, he passed his driver’s test on the first try. Fred flunked it twice when his turn came, but by then this was the norm with them: anything that Oscar succeeded at effortlessly was sure to cause his brother strife.

Fred had always imagined it was from his father that he had inherited his love of the road: a spiritual urge to roll the windows down and flood the car with air on even the most quotidian of grocery store runs, the pleasure of the thrum that rattled through his bones as the engine turned, the rush of gasoline under his hand at a truck stop, the blind joy of streaky sunlight through a windshield. On the weekends that Artie had off work, a younger Fred saw his father transformed: no longer the tired, white-collar office labourer but dressed in relaxed flannel shirts, a rag tucked neatly into his pocket as he tinkered with the Buick’s engine, changed the oil, and polished the wheel rims to a perfect shine. For all the difficulty in their comparatively short shared life, their relationship was marked by an affection and closeness that felt most poignant of all on summer afternoons in the garage, where his father’s love landed on every surface of his body like rain.

It was important to Artie that the Buick be spotless for their Sunday drives - not because he intended to show it off, Fred learned, but because he never wanted his wife and family to have to ride in something they were less than proud of. His mother would sit in the front, her hair swept up off of her neck so that Fred could count the freckles at the nape, the starched collar of her Sunday dress fluttering ever so slightly in the breeze. He and Oscar were permitted to change out of their church-wear and banished to the backseat, where they played slapjack over the middle seat with bruising force and competed to see how many red cars they could count out their windows.

Rolling through the heart of town and around the sloping lanes by the golf course, the sides of the Buick gleaming as if new, they drove through endless summers, falls painted golden and orange, and made crowded, slushy treks out to see Christmas lights. The main feature of the family drive was the inevitable singalong: the Buick had a built-in cassette player that Artie kept loaded with Johnny Cash and Hank Williams tapes while his wife assigned harmonies. These memories will be the strongest of all when he thinks of his family: a pure, sealed capsule of his childhood innocence, warbling _“i fell into a burning ring of fire”_ off-key next to his older brother, his father steering them cool and steady through the shady streets of the place he was born - a place that seemed to him, at that time, as the loveliest town in the world.

/

Fred’s first car was a 1966 Ford Mustang, rescued from the local junkyard by a hundred bucks and his father’s close rapport with its owner: a man whose identity was seemingly indivisible from the wire-fenced plot of land he owned - for reasons unknown to Fred, he went by the name Junkyard Steve. For the first several months under Artie and Fred’s care the car (or what paint remained on it) was a muddy yellow. Fred, of course, picked out a cherry red when the time came to repaint it.

Before colour was even a question, however, the car had to be rebuilt and restored to working order. Restoring Fred’s car was a more involved endeavour than it had been for Oscar’s first vehicle, which had likewise come from Steve, but with only minor engine trouble and some fire-damaged upholstery. Fred’s Mustang needed all new parts, many of which they trekked back to the junkyard to find, so that the finished product was a Frankenstein of pieces: a Ford-Chevy-Plymouth-DeSoto held together with the hope and grit of its creators.

Fred didn’t mind the challenge - with the same unwavering faith with which he and FP would re-build the old VW they called the _Shaggin Wagon_ , he could look at the rusted hulk of his soon-to-be automobile and see in his mind’s eye a finished product. Skimming his hand over the damaged hood in the Andrews garage, he would close his eyes and imagine it sun-warmed and gleaming: stuffed with surfboards at the shore, roaring out of the school parking lot in a squealing of tires. Fred already had a list of places to take the Mustang - almost as long as the list of girls he intended to pick up in it. Best of all, though, fixing the car meant spending time with his dad, in an environment where conversation would be secondary to the rhythm of their work.

Fred and Artie were always able to communicate without too much talking - Fred loved his father dearly, in some ways more dearly than his mother, but this was never apparent from the way they spoke to one another, leaving long spaces where other fathers and sons would fit words. Fred could sit and gossip with his mother for hours about his life, outstaying even the most sprightly of her bridge friends. When it came to Artie, however, there never seemed to be enough to say, and when Artie drove him to school, they drove in silence.

The longest conversations they had were feuds, and because so many of their conversations did lead to a fight, it's possible that Fred’s mother decided it was for the better that they were never talking. There was no lack of warmth between them when they did communicate - Artie asked him the proper questions over the dinner table and doled out the occasional advice; Fred was always pleased and proud when he made his father laugh with some anecdote or joke. But for the most part, theirs was an understanding that did not need words, and both were comfortable with the absence of speech- though the uncertainty of each other’s thoughts and feelings set them continually on edge.

Artie had borrowed an instruction manual for the Mustang from a friend of his, and referred to it often - Artie Andrews was a man who did things by the book. Fred found him reading it for pleasure in their living room sometimes, his reading glasses propped on his nose, his thick finger tracing the words as his eyes moved down the page. He taught his son no shame in consulting the instructions - a lesson that never seemed to stick, as Fred preferred his gut to be his internal compass well into his adult life.

Regardless, Fred always adored learning from his dad, listening quietly as he demonstrated the mechanics of the engine, his voice warm and confident and softer than Fred was used to. When they encountered a problem they could not solve, Artie would send him to the metal bookshelf in the garage where Artie kept all of his automotive books, and ask him to find one that would help. Artie bolstered his automotive hobby with a healthy amount of reading, but all of the knowledge Fred will later relate to FP and his own son was passed down through his father’s voice, the touch of Artie’s hands on his own. Many years later, packaged away under Christmas decorations in the Andrews basement, these books will remain - a piece of his father that Fred will never bear to give up.

As a young child of six or seven, Oscar had helped his father with the Buick’s upkeep: both of them emerging grease-splattered and filthy in time for lunch, wolfing down egg-salad sandwiches at the kitchen table before racing upstairs to jockey for position under the hot spray of the shower. His mother told Fred the story for years with fondness, unaware of the grief it was causing her youngest: _but where was i_ , Fred would bemoan, and be told that he was only a baby then, too young to polish a wheel rim or empty a drip pan.

Artie was a young man when Oscar was born - Fred has seen this version of his father only in pictures, with a head of dark hair and a college boy’s svelte figure. It is easy to imagine him showering with his son, scrubbing a tiny Oscar’s back down with a bar of soap the way he might have showered with his brothers in a child, tender with his small frame, the mirror fogged and the tile floor damp. Fred and Artie had never had such bodily closeness, and Fred felt oddly miserable when his brother recalled these years with joy - it seemed to underscore their difference and thus his own inadequacy, that there was a symmetry to Artie-and-Oscar - bodily, spiritually - that he had somehow failed to attain.

Fred was troubled by his own envy at Oscar’s familiarity with their father, the love it seemed Artie had always shown his eldest so freely. It appeared that his own relationship with Artie was always precarious, that he struggled constantly to find that same kind of rapport, a balance where both parties felt comfortable and at ease. Most of all, he had a private fear when he considered why Artie had rarely, if ever, been naked around him - that his father had somehow sussed out the separation between Fred and his brother, the unresolved charge that had yet to infuse the space between Fred’s body and those of his male friends. His envy for the love and intimacy that his father showed Oscar eventually gave way to a fear and suspicion, a dread that Artie had read in him the unease and mystery of his confused attraction to men. It saddened him too: he was still approaching this breach even at the age of nine and ten, when Oscar recalled their showers had ended, and had of course never felt any kind of desire for his father, though he had always thought him beautiful. 

His mother explained that Artie had offered Fred the chance to help him with the car when he was around the same age, but Fred at six had been more interested in his baseball, in tree-climbing and games of make-believe. Sitting still and performing small tasks of labour were low on his list of interests. As a result, Fred guarded the hours he and Artie spent on the Mustang with increased interest, as though he were somehow making up for a ritual he had neglected to understand the importance of. He felt a guilty triumph at Oscar’s absence from their work - Oscar was studying something practical at Riverdale Community College by then, a chip off the old block - and for the first time Artie’s patience and affection were all his.

They worked steadily throughout the spring and summer, silently, celebrating every small success  - the first time the new engine lept to a choky, coughing purr, both Artie and Fred reacted: Fred with a whoop of unabashed, surprised delight and Artie with a deep, delighted belly-laugh. Artie’s hand had landed on his shoulder and squeezed proudly, a gesture that Fred can still feel in his sleep: rare and solid and forthright in its proudness. Artie was never outwardly affectionate enough for Fred’s needs, but in that moment it was enough for that day, and the success of the sputtering engine felt larger and more important than anything else in the world.

There was more, too - he understood that the gift his father was giving him was not just the car, but his time, and that in that time there was a love that was consistent and unwavering and purposefully bereft of brutality. His father’s past was mostly opaque to him, but he understood his father’s relationship with his grandfather to be a challenging one: harsh, and even violent, and that he should be doubly grateful for Artie’s patience in wake of this knowledge.

For years he meant to explain this gratitude to his father, that fixing the Mustang had meant the world to him, that he had understood and felt lucky for the love that his father was trying to express. But as often would happen, Fred simply never found the time or the words.

By the morning of his fifteenth year the car was finished, and Fred’s full-time occupation became streaking around town to show it off to his friends, so that the most Artie saw of the fruits of their labour was the taillights winking goodbye as his son peeled out of the driveway in the morning and turned the corner onto Elm.

/

Riding in the Buick will be a memory that belongs solidly in his childhood years: singalongs turned to family discussions as they got older, which turned somewhat sourly into passionate debates once their personal politics had divided. Oscar and then Fred got their own cars, and Fred’s own cassette collection - rock tapes with names that offended his straight-laced parents - overgrew the glove compartment, provoking a good amount of animosity in his father. They retired the Buick in the autumn of ‘91, and Artie, though his health was beginning to fail, tinkered alone and good-humouredly with its replacement. Never one for sentiment, Artie insisted the new car was better, quieter, though Fred found he began to miss the telltale muffler-rattle of his papa returning home from work in the quiet street.

  
Of all the memories Fred revisits of his father, the end of their family tradition hits without much force - this lapse was perhaps the first in a long series of _lasts_ in their small family, where the warm, crowded quarters of childhood had begun to recede to the air and expansion of real life and real death in turn. Still, though, he regrets losing them, treasures the golden memory of himself and Oscar singing _Daddy Sang Bass_ in the back seat for more than it’s worth: by the time Oscar Andrews was wiped from the earth at a snowy intersection one night in December, family drives had become no more than a footnote in his very short life.


	4. adam raised a cain

The year Fred was thirteen years old, you couldn’t have paid him to say the name  _ Hank Williams  _ out loud. The music he played on the family record player and his own portable radio was  _ rock and roll _ , baby,  heralded in by the cat-in-heat wailing of guitars and raucous bashing of drums. Oscar still only listened to whatever was on the radio, his worst offence singing occasionally off-key in the shower, and Fred’s fanatic obsession with certain groups and songs rankled Artie’s nerves: the whole thing seemed to him as an enormous waste of time. 

FP’s recent introduction to the world of metal meant that some of Fred’s tapes were even more obnoxious, and the Andrewses were treated to angry, guttural screaming in the place of the gravelly folk tunes and classical instruments that Artie enjoyed. It wasn’t unusual for Artie to pluck one of Fred’s tapes out of the stereo mid-play: once, in the very hottest month of summer, two of Fred’s records were left on the porch to warp and melt in the full sun, and liability for the deed was shuttled between father and son for years. 

It was an election year - for months the airwaves were crowded with debate, and Fred’s voice joined them now too: he had no real knowledge of politics yet, but had begun to sense for the first time that the expected views his father held stood in opposition to his own. Artie loved to hold forth an opinion, Fred had begun to challenge him, and they clashed repeatedly over breakfast, lunch, dinner, and around the TV set at night, much to his mother's dismay. Fred hated his father’s party on principle, was angered by the sign Artie kept planted in their yard, and agreed with the sentiment learned from his rock and roll gods- that the establishment needed an overhaul, fast, and that he, the young, should be leading the charge. 

Every word out of Fred’s mouth in the year of 1988 was a provocation, every sentiment a challenge, ever discussion a house-shaking quarrel, even if they started on entirely quotidian terms - a request from Artie that Fred brush his hair before he leave the house, or pass the steamed carrots at dinner. His hair was another issue: grazing his shoulders in thick, dark caramel-coloured tangles, it made his father tense with displeasure. Artie began his vendetta against Fred’s long hair with subtle nudges - he would brush the ends of it gently with his hand and remark that it was time for a trim, this escalating before the year was out to Artie yelling “cut your hair!” without glancing up when Fred passed by his armchair on the way out the door.

Fred didn’t cut his hair, and this was surprising to Artie, who had always been obeyed unquestioningly by his youngest son. Fred at twelve had been a healthy red-blooded American specimen of boy - skinny as straw and with scuffed sneakers and worn blue jeans, mischievous as a cat with an innocent, clean-scrubbed smile to make up for it. The scrapes he got into could be nullified with his father’s declaration that  _ boys would be boys _ , and Fred flew gleefully under this rule up until adolescence: habitually rescuing foul balls from the neighbour’s glass-strewn living room and rehoming the occasional Sweetwater bullfrog into Mary Moore’s lunch box at school. 

Then came the guitar. That the guitar and this newfound sense of rebellion came into his life at the same time did not pass below Artie’s notice. He had nothing against Fred learning an instrument - it would bestow upon him such much-needed discipline, he had suggested at first - but Fred’s pursuit of the electric version, a flashy red one from the music store window, discomforted him. He hadn’t wanted the thing in his house - it was Bunny who had gone out and purchased it for Fred’s Christmas present, it was her who had wrapped it and placed it delicately under the tree, and it was Bunny who would run her hand soothingly over his forearm to calm him when, on a sunny Saturday afternoon, the screaming of chords came skittering down from Fred’s attic bedroom and out the open window into the street. 

In summer Artie learned that he could push Fred and his guitar out of the house by turning up the thermostat - Fred’s attic room, already sweltering for six months of the year, could be driven up to deadly temperatures with a nudge. Fred would emerge, sweat-dripping and scowling, storm over to the thermostat, and glare at the reading. Artie, raising an eyebrow over his paper, would suggest that maybe Fred go over to a friend’s house if he found it too warm. 

In winter, lighting a fire and closing certain vents would send smoke up through the grate to achieve the same effect. Fred would grab his coat and guitar and go out, the door slamming shut and his car keys jingling, and Bunny would look on worriedly as Artie re-opened the grates and relaxed in his easy chair, witnessing the growing divide between father and son as Fred’s Mustang squealed off down the street. 

In July, Fred asked his father if they could soundproof the garage so that his newly formed rock and roll band could have a place to practice. Artie’s response was a firm no. 

“I hate your guts,” replied Fred, shocked at his own courage. It was the first time he had said that in his life, and he could already tell he was going to walk it back with a mollified apology within the hour. Artie had only turned the page of his newspaper and calmly remarked that it was a shame in that case that he was the only father Fred had and that he only wanted the best for him. 

He had never let on how much the comment hurt.

Of all the singers Fred adored, Springsteen was his hero, then and always - it seemed to Fred as he got older that they were twin souls, each growing up in some kind of Jersey brotherhood, tethered by a myriad of shared experiences that were too similar to be a coincidence. Artie had tried, patiently, to understand his son’s fascination with the lyrics on the inside of his album sleeves, but no amount of time sitting with his youngest by the record player could illuminate for him the draw that this stranger from New Jersey had over his child. He was wary of the posters Fred stood on tip-toe to affix to the ceiling over his bed, and insisted on more than one occasion that Fred move them from the ceiling to the wall.

Others took their place. Fred was enraptured, and Artie’s patience with the singer wore thin. When Fred showed up at home with his right earlobe oozing raw and infected from a needle Alice Smith had shoved through the skin in her garage, Artie’s blood pressure skyrocketed. He had almost threatened to toss Fred’s collection, but realized at the same time that it would do him no good. By then, Fred had every song Bruce Springsteen had ever written memorized. 


	5. bless your children give them names

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for child abuse, graphic injury

At twelve years old, Oscar Andrews had broken his arm in two places climbing into Forsythe Senior’s yard on a dare. Drunk in the middle of the afternoon, the much larger man had chased Artie’s son with an unloaded shotgun until he had tripped over an old car engine, landed on his arm, broken it, scrambled over the fence, and broken it a second time. Senior began loading the gun after this incident, and the neighbourhood kids gave the once-coveted yard a wide berth once another unlucky child almost took a bullet to the ear. 

It was yet another chapter in the longstanding feud between Artie and Forsythe Senior, one that had no signs of stopping or waning until one of them died. It was an unjust irony, then, that Senior’s only son and Artie’s youngest were best friends. Forsythe Junior had outperformed every other drummer that had shown up to audition for Fred’s rag-tag group of music makers, and he and his drumsticks had become a permanent fixture in the Andrews home, leaving bloodstains and cigarette ashes scattered around the drum set that Fred rented piece by piece from the high school. 

Against his better judgement, he allowed the friendship. Bunny mothered him like her own - how could she not? little sad-eyed stranger that he was - and Forsythe Junior appeared more and more often at Artie’s dinner table. It was obvious from the way he ate that Senior didn’t feed the kid, and Artie’s disgust at the drunkard’s negligence waned into a cautious sympathy for the injured teenager. Yet he would often think regretfully that of all of the young boys in town Fred might have thought it fit to be friends with, he had chosen the one that irritated his father the most. 

Artie distrusted the teenager’s upbringing, saw a glint of something in FP’s eyes that spoke of danger. Sure enough, by the time Fred was fifteen he’d somehow twice become involved with the police in the middle of the night, himself and FP caught in some mischief and hauled to the small-town station for a talking-to. Artie had stormed down to the barracks, sleepy-eyed and vengeful, and exchanged friendly nods with the current police captain while fixing his youngest with a furious stare. On both occasions, Fred had shuffled his feet and looked guilty, but Artie had never once detected a hint of remorse in FP’s eyes. 

Then there were the phone calls home from school - intermittent throughout his youth, but increasing in number and severity now that he and FP ran wild together in their spare time. No amount of discipline seemed to work anymore, and the boy who defended FP against all odds seemed to him suddenly a stranger - a long-haired, earring-wearing delinquent that he would have scowled at on the street, wondering what on earth his parents were thinking to let him out in those clothes. 

Artie’s only response could be to tighten his control, and Fred’s response, in turn, was to pull away, spending more and more time with FP and breaking every rule Artie laid about spending time over the tracks. Artie swore up and down many times in many ways that if a day came when Fred came home in one of those infernal jackets, that he’d be packing their bags for Middale that evening. These admonitions disguised a much darker fear: that one night his son would not come from the wrong side of town at all. 

Then one April night he had climbed the stairs to Fred’s attic bedroom and found them lying side by side beneath the sheets, laughing and sharing a joint with the smell of alcohol permeating the air. Artie had suggested, none too kindly, that it was time FP go home, and FP didn’t return to the house for quite some time. 

Artie had never admitted, to Bunny or to himself, that it wasn’t the alcohol or the weed that had disturbed him - he had always been lenient in allowing Oscar some experimentation with such things, turning a deaf ear to his eldest son’s habit of shimmying down the drainpipe from his second-floor bedroom every now and again. Fred had been uncharacteristically remorseful about the issue, and both father and son had taken to pretending that it had never happened. 

Then there came a night when he was woken abruptly by screaming outside, and the first thought in Artie’s head was  _ Dear God, not my son, please,  _ because Oscar had been dead by then for a year and Fred was all that he had left. It was for him that Fred was screaming -  _ dad, papa,  _ over and over, interspersed with  _ help, help, please - _  and Artie moved like someone had lit a match under his body, almost wrenching the staircase banister out of the wall in his haste to get the porch. 

The front door was flung wide open, lights flickering on in the neighbourhood as a dog bayed somewhere far away, and when Artie got to the foot of the stairs, pulling on his robe, his son was crouched beyond the open front door holding what looked to him like a dark lump of fabric. It wasn’t until he was standing at Fred’s side, his hand on his child’s shaking back, that he understood that it was a person, that the person was a young person, and that the young person’s face was beaten so badly that it was beyond recognition. 

“I’m sorry,” Senior’s son had sobbed, his voice muddied by the sound of wet blood in his throat, and Artie had been surprised to hear the crumpled body both conscious and speaking, considering the amount of damage that had been done. He was wearing a red shirt that Artie would later realize had once been white. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know where to go-” and Artie had scooped him up without another word and run with him into the house, leaving a smear of blood on the porch and the front door wide open behind him. 

“Hush now,” he had ordered as FP had writhed in his arms, shaking, “you’ll be alright,” the tone paramedics used with the doomed, soldiers with comrades who had lost arms or legs to land mines. He was hushing him still when he laid him on the couch without a thought for the upholstery, the boy sobbing and arching his back off the cushions as blood spilled over his lips and teeth. 

One eye was swollen completely shut, and the other was leaking bloody tears down the bridge of his shattered nose. His lips were bleeding, his face purple and blue and what looked like a burn mark on his neck. Just from carrying him, Artie could tell that his ribs were broken - his collarbone too, maybe, and so it was against his better judgement that he let the boy sit up, guiding him against him as he howled in pain at Artie’s touch and leaned into his chest. In an instant, Artie had understood why - the skin on his back had been flayed, torn and bleeding and littered with the unmistakable print of a belt buckle. 

“You’re alright,” he had repeated endlessly, holding the shaking teenager against him as best he could, his heart sick and his hands the only part of him steady. He had barked for Fred to bring him water and towels, and he tried to clean him now, tried to be gentle, but FP shied from gentleness like it was foreign to him, and in the end, he only worked and held him down and bit his lip to keep from screaming. 

He stayed with him until he had sutured every wound on his back, until Bunny was bandaging him wordlessly and Fred was pressing ice to his shattered cheek. Then Artie had very calmly stood, his legs sore from kneeling, taken his hat off the rack at the front door, and walked upstairs to get dressed. 

Artie had raised his sons to use their words in place of fists - he himself was a pacifist who was as separated from violence as he was from the poverty and dirt of his parents’ farm. But he had gone to the trailer door that night and hammered on it until Senior threw it open with a snarl, and he had driven home from the trailer park with one hand wrapped in a handkerchief, his knuckles torn and raw and swollen and drenched with blood that wasn’t his own. 

The front door was shut when he got home, but the porch light was burning. The couch was bare, damp and clean. Artie had walked slowly to the second floor, pausing suddenly halfway to the attic when the rustle of movement from the room they had kept shut for a year caught his eye. 

Oscar’s window was open. The blue curtains were billowing out from the window, and there was a form in the bed, laying on its side. 

He understood why they had laid him in Oscar’s room - to climb to Fred’s would be to brave the second set of stairs, and narrow as they were, they’d risk hurting him more. But for a long moment he’d stood in the doorway and paused, and as he breathed with the rustle of the trees outside, the moonlight casting white shapes across the sleeping body, he saw Oscar just once more - his son asleep and warm and alive, breathing restfully and safe in the dark. 

It had taken all of his fortitude to blink the image away, but it had gone and it was Forsythe Senior’s son in the bed, a lump the size of an apple rising over his swollen-shut right eye. The bruising trips a pang of long-dead guilt in Artie - he had seen and pretended not to see the ever-fluctuating rainbow of black eyes that FP occasionally wore for dinner at their house in the years that Oscar was still alive. Artie had breathed in, terse and anxious, and rubbed his thumb superstitiously along the cotton of Oscar’s striped sheets. 

For a moment the impulse to kiss FP’s head almost drowns him, still half-pretending that it was Oscar, but he had shaken himself free from the dream and left in a hurry, filling the basin at the sink with cold water and plunging his knuckles in for a long time to take away the swell. 

Fred had been asleep in the attic when Artie finally reached him, tear stains drying on his young cheeks and mottling the pillowcase, looking closer to seven than seventeen as he tossed fitfully. Artie had brushed his cheek with his undamaged hand, but Fred had only murmured feverishly in his sleep and turned over. His wife had held him when he finally climbed into his bed, a tightness akin to greeting someone who had come home from a very long and perilous journey. 

From that day on there were four of them in the house again, and Fred was happy, and that was alright. 


End file.
